MY TYPICAL WRITING DAY.... JESSICA MARTIN

My name is Jessica Martin and I am a professional actress and published writer and illustrator of comics and graphic novels. Scott very kindly invited me to share my insights and my routine for capturing the muse back in summer of 2019. It wasn’t that I was procrastinating but at the time that he asked me, I was on the brink of having my graphic memoir “Life Drawing. A Life Under Lights” published and subsequently there were various talks, conventions and even a cabaret to promote the book, in the pipeline. And now, here we are in March 2020 and I’ve just finished the run of a musical in London which I wasn’t expecting. I tell you all of this pre-amble because I am struck by the irony of how I first got into writing because I was at a stage in my career where the “resting’ interludes of an actors’ life were longer than the ‘employed’ ones. “ Creativity breeds creativity” so the saying goes.

Even though I would have denied this notion a few years ago ( in my self-loathing acting period), I now realise that actors are themselves creatives. Although our primary job is to be a cipher for the ideas of a playwright, it is the individual actors’ emotional experience and perspective that informs the dramatic choices and nuances that will be employed in the final interpretation. The fact that there are thousands of actors who have delighted us with “Hamlet” throughout history, endorses that fact. So it goes without saying that an actor may be full of ideas even if he only gets to express them when he is ‘employed’. In fact the notion of a ‘resting’ actor is laughable. We are always restless! Some of us let off steam through gossip, schadenfraude, oversharing on social media or boldly going to the place where we can be masters of our own destiny…the writer’s chair. And then we find out that our play, screenplay or treatment has to climb the ‘greasy pole’ the same way that actors do. However, the writing wins over the idle chatter in that we have set the elusive words onto paper or screen. There is the satisfaction of somehow creating something lasting.

The full backstory of how I came into the field of writing and illustrating is there in my graphic memoir ( shameless plug!!). Suffice to say, I had a eureka moment when I found out that my rediscovered passion for drawing could be put to narrative use in the form of comics. Actually, it was Phill Jupitus who pointed me in that direction when we did a production of “Spamalot” together. I had written a screenplay and a play before that so I had an idea of how to create a dramatic arc for a storyline. When I discovered that comics were an easier medium to get published in because there was a growing movement for small press independent works, I was all in.

So now I knew the medium I was going to make comics, what genre was I going to choose for my storytelling? I started off with slice of life comic strips which I published on my website, called “Wishful Inking”. Hardly the stuff of superheroes, it was more about juggling family life with my burgeoning creativity. Actually there was a superhero in it..my late mother. In one of the stories I depicted how she and her partner did a complete makeover on the study in our house whilst we were away on a family holiday. When we came home I was amazed to find I had a writing and art den totally customised, from which I am writing this piece! This meant that I also had that all important “writer’s chair”, the one from which Stephen King says you should never shift from until you have put words on the page.

My main inspiration as far as subject matter goes, is the golden age of Hollywood. I got my idea for my first graphic novel, “Elsie Harris Picture Palace” whilst reading a biography on Alfred Hitchcock. I was fascinated by the influence of Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville who had taught him everything he needed to know about film-making when he started off as lowly sign painter for the caption frames on silent films. In my mind, the story of a young girl who works her way up through the film industry started to take hold of my imagination.

I remember writing little squares in a notebook and writing the ideas for a particular scene within them. I later graduated to the traditional use of index cards which I pinned up on the notice board in my office for the layout of the story. Whilst pursuing the idea of a long form graphic novel, I also decided it might be wise to write something in the same genre in a shorter form. By this time, I had made the acquaintance of a top comics illustrator called Mark Buckingham whose work for Vertigo’s “Fables” I much admired. He invited to write a one page comic strip which he would illustrate for an upcoming comics anthology. That was a very informative exercise. It was almost like writing a joke in that there was a set up, a play-out and a punchline. It was challenging because we had the constraints being confined to twelve panels. I made three attempts at the script but it came out well. Mark invited me to share his table at the Thought Bubble Comic Con and that gave me the perfect ‘marketplace’ to test out my short comic.

The inspiration for my twelve page comic, “It Girl” was, like “Elsie Harris Picture Palace” almost whilst I was doing something else; in this case, watching a documentary about silent movie actress Clara Bow. I was so moved by the programme that I instantly decided hers was a story worthy of capturing in a comic. I did a lot of research, including reading a whole biography about Clara Bow before moving to the story that I wanted to tell. Research is something that I enjoy but am fully aware that it may eventually become something that sits in the background of your own mind but doesn’t dictate the final story. My story of Elsie Harris was fiction but set in a real time in history and I did a lot of research into the way that art departments worked in English and Hollywood studios of the Thirties. I could have written whole books on some of the sub characters but knowing I had a page count of 152, that was not going to happen. Certainly not when I had pictures to draw as well.

The process for creating the Clara Bow comic has effectively become the blueprint for all my comic and graphic work since. Having done my research, I then did some mind-mapping of all the elements that I wanted to include in the story. I did my little word version of the sequential narrative ( boxes with the details of what was going to happen in each picture.) From that I created my script whereby the action was effectively a description of what happens in each panel and the dialogue was what would be in the speech bubbles plus narrative for the narration boxes.

When eventually I got to work on “Elsie”, I actually used Final Draft to create a full script for the entire book but broken up into pages instead of scenes. Where possible, I tried to have a shift in action or plot at the end of each page. And then I would move into the equivalent of index cards in drawing form which was to do a thumbnail layout of each page.

With both “Elsie” and my other long form work, the graphic memoir, I had to make some sacrifices in other parts of my life. With deadlines in front of me, social engagements were a rare treat and with “Life Drawing. A Life Under Lights”, I even turned down some auditions that might have materialised into juicy roles. By this time in my life, however, I have developed some resistance to the mirage effect showbiz can have on the impressionable mind. In working on my own projects, I was betting on myself and if nothing else, it strengthens your resolve. Now I had made my book a mission. I got up early every day and set a desktop calendar with goals set for every day. I never met these goals precisely but they certainly kept me on track.

In the writing of “Life Drawing”, I was drawing on my own life experience but it still required in depth research. Fot instance, my late father was a jazz musician at a number of nightclubs in Soho in the fifties and it was almost impossible to source images of the original venues. I had the added luxury of our newly built garden annex to go to and immerse myself in the writing.. See picture here.

Being somewhat fond of apps that could sprinkle fairy dust on your work, I also made friends with Scrivener ( I’m using it here) which has a handy corkboard function where to can type up your index cards and view them in tandem with whatever you’re writing.

( Not my own index cards but a dummy sample from Scrivener. Can’t be giving away all my secrets, eh?)

It also has a word count and I see here that I may have transgressed the reader’s welcome. So I’m going to sign off. Before I do though, I just wanted to add that if you ever feel stuck and need something to whet your appetite for writing, I can highly recommend Stephen King’s “On Writing”, Anne Lamott’s “Bird By Bird” and Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Big Magic”.

Thank you. Now go forth and create!!

PS. My book “Life Drawing. A Life Under Lights” is available direct from these links -  UnboundBooks and Amazon and Waterstones websites.

You can find Jessica at any of the following...

Website: www.jessicamartinofficial.com

Twitter: @jessica7martin
Instagram: jessica_artymiss